Tag Archives: embroidery

Best known as the Malaysian winner of the second season of Asia’s Next Top Model who now walks runways around the world, Sheena Liam has also crafted a name for herself as an embroidery artist. Her delicate, minimalist art is sewn through with images of freedom and self-care.

She first picked up needlework from her mother in childhood, but only later on in her modeling career did she revisit the old-fashioned craft. It started out as a peaceful, expressive activity to keep herself occupied during downtime between jobs, but she slowly began taking it more seriously, and before she knew it she’d made a series.

“I was never really drawn to it as a practice until I started seeing all these other artists breaking boundaries with embroidered work, and I realized we weren’t bound to tradition and stagnant designs,” Liam says. Like the carefree movement of the hair detail, each piece is open to interpretation. “I’m not pushing any agenda on anyone.”

The figures in her works are often based on Liam herself, stitched with dark-green thread that stands out against the off-white linen. They can take anywhere from four days to a month to complete, depending on their size and complexity. “Sometimes I’m doing something completely new, so it takes some trial and error before I have a finished product I’m okay with,” she explains.

Each piece explores a moment in a woman’s life, from simple daily routines, like changing clothes or getting ready for a girl’s night out, to subtle moments of empowerment, like independently braiding or cutting off one’s hair for the first time. Just as she does in her modeling, her figures convey a mood or feeling through posture and pose. The free-flowing hair adds a gentle movement to contrast with the static figure, making the whole piece come alive. Though the style is minimalist, the figures are rich in detail.

“The actual embroidering is my favorite part of the process, so I try to prolong it by adding as much detail as possible,” she says. “The hair can be frustrating because I don’t have a set formula or technique. Every piece is different, and sometimes at the hair stage, which I usually do last, I might ruin a piece I’ve spent hours on.”

Inspiration comes from anything: a song, a general mood, or even a feeling. Liam compiles images from the internet onto her mini mood board and has even sought inspiration in life drawing classes. “You get to explore other different types of bodies and poses through the models,” she explains.

As someone who’s made a career out of being someone else’s canvas, here she has the freedom to express her own creativity.

In April 2017, Liam decided to share her work on Instagram under the handle @times.new.romance, a play on the name of the popular font. The handle suggests a romantic feeling of viewing peaceful modern moments fleeting by, in keeping with her art—but perhaps this writer has put too much thought into it. “I just thought it was a nice name for an account,” Liam says. The account eventually gained widespread attention from media, art-lovers, and fans, leading to her first solo exhibition, a milestone in any artist’s career.

In October, the embroidery works were presented at Item Gallery in Paris in a show also titled Times New Romance. As it happens, Liam dismissed the idea of a solo show when she was first approached about it. “I didn’t think too much of my embroidery to start with,” she says. “Honestly, it was a lot of people putting a huge amount of faith in me from the start that propelled me to work on a body of cohesive work. I had collectors and other artists who took care of me, so I could work in the capacity that I did.”

“I’m not sure. I’ve held out on a lot of projects because I wanted to be focused on creating pieces for my show. But maybe now I can relax a little and have more fun with it. If offered the right space and gallery, I’d consider a show in Malaysia. But I don’t have any pieces anymore, so it’ll probably take a few more years.”

Radical feminism is a school of thought based on the view that women’s oppression is the foundation of all forms of exploitation.

Akhsa’s handmade book has sixteen pages. With a gentle but objective tone, she uses text and image to discuss radical feminism’s history, introduce its representative figures (and some of their well-known lines), and explain key terms such as “patriarchy” and “sisterhood.”

The work was Akhsa’s final project at Lasalle College of the Arts in Singapore, from which she recently graduated. Titled Feisty Girls, the project included the inaugural issue of Girls Gone Wild (“What the ‘F'”), along with a series of illustrations. When she first set about choosing a topic, Akhsa drew on her longstanding interest in politics, and her anger at the unfair treatment women encountered. “After doing some research, I realized many people either don’t understand what radical feminism is or have a negative perception of it. That’s when I first decided to create a zine introducing radical feminism.”

“Since the zine is about radical feminism, why not go radical and out of the norm?”

By choosing such a unconventional form, Akhsa had to sacrifice a lot of time. It took her eight months altogether, most of her last year at college. She didn’t sleep well during that time, and her grades suffered. “Instead of making it easy to produce, I made it more delicate and difficult,” she says. “I chose embroidery because stitching has always been related to women and stereotypes of women.”

So far there’s only one “issue” of Girls Gone Wild, and there’s only a single copy in existence. Akhsa says issues two and three are still planned, but since she started work after graduation, she just doesn’t have enough time.

The other portion of the Feisty Girls project consists of a series of illustrations that are also reflections and questions about feminism. Akhsa first focused on girls who consider themselves feminists, giving them a survey about themselves and putting their responses and the emotions they revealed into bold, bright illustrations.

She always takes an original in approach in her art, and this time she drew illustrations of what she considers feminists for a new age onto old storybooks whose main characters are girls. It’s a graphic juxtaposition of past and present depictions of women.

“All feminists have gone through different experiences in their life that have made them who their are. I wanted to tell people how every feminist is different, and how different feminism is now from the past.”

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The city of Lucknow has historical roots of being a cradle of art and literature in India. Inspired by the cultural backstory of his hometown, documentary photographer Taha Ahmad sought to celebrate the city’s rich heritage. This led to Swan Song of the Badlas, a photo series that documents the plight of local artisans who are attempting to preserve a dying tradition.

纪录片摄影师塔哈·艾哈迈德（Taha Ahmad）的家乡勒克瑙（Lucknow）是印度的艺术和文学中心。深受当地文化传统的启发，Ahmad试图探索其丰富的历史根源。他的摄影作品系列《Swan Song of the Badlas》赞颂了勒克瑙的文化遗产，并展示了努力传承即将失传的传统文化的人们所面临的困境。

Swan Song of the Badlas takes a look at the disappearing art of mukaish badla, a form of embroidery that was once prosperous in Lucknow during the 18th century. This art, which involves inserting threads of gold and silver into fabric, was originally used to beautify chikankari, another form of embroidery that also originated in Lucknow but remains quite well known throughout India.

《Swan Song of the Badlas》深入展现了即将失传的Mukaish badla艺术。这是勒克瑙当地一种特色刺绣形式，在18世纪曾风靡一时。这种刺绣艺术将金线和银线编织于织物中，最初是用来美化另一种勒克瑙特色刺绣形式chikankari。Chikankari至今在印度依然颇受欢迎。

Mukaish badla, however, was much more niche. The extravagance of using precious metals as embellishment meant that only the ruling class of the city sought after it in the past. But at the craft’s peak, the number of artisans (or badlas) in town reached upwards of 3,000. Today, there are less than 25 practitioners of the craft left in Lucknow, most of whom are over the age of 65. “Their population is dwindling, and soon, in not more than 20 or 25 years, they will become a part of history that can only be recalled in a poignant daydream or through visual imagery,” Ahmad wistfully says.

The remaining artisans, who have devoted their whole lives to the art, make an abysmal wage of anywhere between two and three U.S. dollars per day. Their work can last up to ten hours per day and everything is done in small, suffocating rooms. Ahmad’s dramatic, black-and-white photo series is an intimate vignette of these surviving craftsmen, revealing their struggles, their plights, and their resiliency in fighting to maintain an art that’s being washed out by the waves of time. Scroll down to see more photos from the series.